Wrote this a long time ago. Too short for an article:
Perverted - Hentai in Japanese. But the word pervert means
deviation from normal or accepted. So, how can all guys be
perverts?

Did you ever notice that the sex scene in the movie is generally
at about the same realative place as the guitar solo in a song?

Real Turret Behavior
Updated: 2009-06-04

When a real battleship loads it's guns it brings them to level where the assisted
loading mechanisms can be used to reload. Once the gun is loaded it is re-elevated
to the current elevation setting. Each gun is loaded individually. On the Iowa
class this is a two man team and is more machine assisted and takes roughly one
minute thirty seconds. On some WWII era footage I saw completely automated
loading machinery controlled by a single person using levers with roughly a
minute reload time. One site lists the Iowa at 30 seconds reload, which I could
see if the crew were well trained. The video was more of a fumbling crew. It
shows reload times for various WWII ships averaging 30 seconds, some under, some
over. The site also lists the the Iowa as being able to elevate her guns 8 degrees
per second.

This means that gun elevation between firings is not a constant for a given
turret. This also means that reload times will vary somewhat between guns in
a turret. I had previously assumed that all turret guns, indeed all guns would
be fired in broadside fashion normally. On watching videos I have begun to doubt
that this is normal. They certainly seems capable of firing a real broadside,
but often fire one barrel at a time. I have heard that firing a full broadside
will physically move the ship over in the water, this is actually not true, the
sideways motion from firing a broadside is very minor, but the concussion force does tend to make
things that aren't secured in the ship fall down and such. It may well be that
firing a full broadside really does not make sense if your going to be firing
for an extended period as a constant bam-bam-bam would be less intrusive to the
crew actually doing their job (plotting courses, radioing messages, etc) than
super loud and shaking BOOMS every 30 seconds or so.

Also for extended fire it would probably make more sense to just allow your guns
to fire as soon as reloading is completed, which would very quickly randomize the
firing order due to human speed differences. It has also been pointed out that
for shooting distant targets it would make sense to wait until the shell struck
before adjusting the aim and firing again.

Now with Big Gun Model Warships, the guns are not elevated, but rather depressed.
I like the idea of putting servos on each barrel, although the level of
complexity goes up quite a bit. This is by no means of any tactual use, but I
feel it would significantly enhance the realism. This would of course require
computer control as nothing like this would be humanly controllable without a
dozen crew members.

Each barrel can return to level after firing for reloading. I guestimate max
depression angle for most Big Gun Model Ships at about 30 degrees. At 8 degrees
per second this would take 3.75 seconds for the guns to return to level. As the
big gun reload rate is 8 seconds, this would be too slow a rate to work well.
Perhaps something like this would look good:

random pause of up to one second
return to level at a rate of 16 degrees per second (2 seconds max)
random pause of at least one second and not more than two to reload
return to correct elevation at previous rate (2 sec)
ready to fire in seven seconds or less

I rather think this would look stunning. It would simulate the human crew
reloading the guns. I could be wrong though. A better (although less realistic)
process would be to adjust the timing in such a way that the guns always return
to correct elevation the instant they are activated to fire. In this manner
the process would serve to provide a visual indication that the guns are ready
to fire which is a tactical improvement that will also look sharp.